Processing known as color balance adjustment can be performed on the entirety of an image taken by an image generation device such as a digital still camera or a video camera (for example, see JP-2001-320727-A).
Color balance adjustment allows for a reduction of color cast in the image, so that photographic subjects that were originally white are correctly reproduced as white.
However, color balance adjustment sometimes results in undesired changes to the colors of specific photographic objects. For example, if near-white pixels have become bluish, color balance adjustment decreases the blue component in the overall image, so that the red component is accentuated. This presents a problem in that, if skin color in the image is at the desired color before color balance adjustment, the skin color will become more red, which is to say that the color will be less desirable. This problem of changing a desired color to a less desirable color as a result of color balance adjustment is not limited to skin color, but may also occur for other chromatic colors such as green and blue, and is, in general, a common problem for specific chromatic colors.